How to Sync Basecamp Todos to Omnifocus or Todoist

Basecamp is a large part of our process at Ai. It tracks most of our communication (a lot of this has been moving to Slack). Basecamp serves as our system of record for signs-offs and deliverables. We also use it's "todo" function pretty heavily in the planning stages and tracking client tasks. Once we get into implementation, we transition to Jira, as it's more powerful. Clients do not have access to Jira.

I don't have an issue tracking Basecamp tasks. It's really good at emailing you when something is due. But, as I've said before, I'd be even BETTER at it, if the tasks were in my world. My world is Omnifocus, but there is a VERY large contingent of Todoist users at Ai. I am the outlier in this. In the past, my reasons for not using Todoist were I didn't want Ai tasks and personal project tasks in the same app, the hotkeys weren't up to snuff, and I didn't want to pay for premium to get notifications. I've since ignored these rules with Omnifocus; It runs everything in my life, it DOES have great hotkeys, and I dropped the $$$ for premium Omnifocus which was more expensive than Todoist premium in the long run. But, this is a topic for another post.

Back on track. How to get Basecamp todos into my system? Again, Zapier to the rescue. Zapier can connect to Basecamp, do some basic filtering to make sure I only get tasks that I care about, and drop them into my Omnifocus inbox. Most of the following steps hold true for both Omnifocus and Todoist

  1. Create a new Zap that triggers when a new Basecamp todo is created. Have it create a new task in your system

  2. Select the appropriate Basecamp account and test it

  3. Select and test your Todoist/Omnifocus account

  4. Choose your Basecamp Account, Project, and Todo list. If you want to filter even more by only items assigned to you, add a custom filter. Do this by either Assignee ID or Name

  5. Match up the Basecamp data to your tool of choice. First is how I send it to Omnifocus. Note, I do need to populate the due date by hand. In both options, I add the url back to the task in Basecamp so I can easy mark it off or comment in it when I'm done. Todoist lets you be a LOT more granular and handles all of the fields so you have no manual intervetntion

  6. My tasks are now in my world. Profit.